Two and a bit years after it became the internet's favourite excuse to knock things off shelves, Little Kitty, Big City is heading to phones. Double Dagger Studio announced the port on August 11 for iOS and Android in late 2026, opened pre-registration on both stores the same day, and then followed up on August 12 with a short clip of the one feature the console versions will never get.
That feature is an AR photography mode, and it is a much better fit for this particular game than AR usually is for anything.
The AR mode puts the cat on your actual floor
Point the camera at a room and you can drop the kitty into it. From there you can resize her, pick a pose, and put her in any of the hats you have collected — then take the photo. Double Dagger describes it as bringing Kitty into your world with her "mischief, adorable hats, and personality" intact.
It is a small feature, and it is also exactly the right one. Little Kitty, Big City is a game whose entire cultural footprint is screenshots: a black cat wearing a tomato, a black cat wearing a duck, a black cat sitting somewhere she has no business sitting. A photo mode that moves that behaviour onto a real kitchen counter is not a gimmick bolted onto a port — it is the game's actual output loop, relocated.
Touch controls, and the question they raise
The mobile build uses a virtual gamepad rather than tap-to-move: an analog stick on the left, and a right-hand cluster covering jump, dash, pounce, and separate left and right paw buttons. Splitting the paws into two buttons is the detail that suggests the port has been thought about — batting objects one paw at a time is the game's signature interaction, and collapsing it into a single "interact" key would have flattened it.
Whether a virtual stick can carry the platforming is the open question. Little Kitty's climbing is forgiving by design, but the game does ask for precision on ledges and pipes, and no amount of careful button layout fully replaces a thumbstick. Controller support is worth watching for when the release window firms up.
Everything from the last two years comes with it
The port includes the full game plus the accumulated post-launch updates, which for this game mostly means customisation. Double Dagger has added hats, collars and cosmetic options steadily since launch, including a Lunar New Year update in February and a birthday update in May. Buying in late means starting with a wardrobe rather than an empty one.
Notably, Double Dagger Studio is handling the mobile version itself rather than farming it out. The studio developed and published the original, and it is on the port too — a reasonable signal for a game whose appeal is almost entirely in the animation and the feel of moving a cat around.
What is still unannounced
The one thing missing from the announcement is money. There is no price and no monetisation model yet — and for a premium indie game moving onto a storefront where "free with ads" is the default, that is the detail that will decide how this lands. The original runs as a paid title on every platform it is on, so a one-off purchase is the reasonable expectation, but nothing has been confirmed.
For context on why the port matters: Little Kitty, Big City launched May 9, 2024 on PC, Switch and Xbox, reached PS4 and PS5 a year later, took Best Debut Game at the Indie Game Awards 2024, and picked up a BAFTA Games Award nomination for Best Family Game in 2025. It is one of the few games of the last few years that genuinely reached people who do not play games, which makes a phone the most obvious place it has not been yet.
Pre-registration is open now on the App Store and Google Play. The release window is late 2026.
